The Icon and the Axe

The posthumous veneration for Pushkin was, and has remained, extraordinary. His papers were immediately impounded as state property; and Lermontov wrote a poem which vigorously attacked Pushkin's censors and critics, signalizing the transfer of the mantle of poetic pre-eminence to another who was to die unnecessarily and prematurely just four years later. Lermontov was a more brooding and introspective figure than Pushkin. With him, the floodgates of emotionalism were opened and the heroes of European romanticism-Byron, Chateaubriand, and Goethe-came to dominate a poetic culture they had previously only influenced. Goethe's Faust was particularly influential. It was translated by Venevitinov, the original poetic Wunderkind of the twenties, and again in the thirties by Eugene Guber, a Saratov pietist who was a friend both of Pushkin and of Fesler, the occultist of the Alexandrian era.92 Odoevsky calls the hero of his highly romantic and widely read Russian Nights "the Russian Faust." The romantic longings and metaphysical preoccupations that were already marked in Lermontov are even further developed in the work of Fedor Tiutchev, who outlived Lermontov by many years, to-become-the-last-great sunfiybr.i3f_the__goJdfiILage of Russian poetry. Beginning with translations from Goethe's Faust in a dehbefately archaic Russian, Tiutchev turned to a world of private fantasy and nocturnal themes that is reminiscent of early, world-weary romantics like Novalis and Tieck.93

This drift toward emotionalism, metaphysics, and obscurity signified the waning of the Pushkinian tradition and a general decline in the popu-

larity of poetry. Growing impatience with the more disciplined and classical art forms of poetry and architecture did not diminish the enthusiasm for art itself, which was still believed to contain the answers to the great questions . of life.fThe idea of art as prophecy can again be traced to Pushkin, whose magnificent poem of 1826, "The Prophet," describes how the angel of the; Lord came to him when he was weary and lost in the wilderness "and my prophetic eyes were awakened like those of a startled eagle." The angel took away his idle inclinations, placed a living coal of fire where once his "trembling heart" had been, and bade him arise and speak the word of God to burn "the hearts of people."94

The generation of artists that succeeded Pushkin tried to do just that. The way in which philosophic concerns created a new prophetic art is illustrated in the interlocked careers of two towering personalities of the "marvelous decade": the writer Nicholas Gogol and the painter Alexander Ivanov. The former dramatizes the transition from poetry to prose in rRussian letters; the latter the change from architecture to painting in the visual arts. Though they labored in different art forms and Gogol was far. moresuccesjful, they shared deep common concerns, and forged the first of the many close links that were to develop between prose writers and painters: Tolstoy and Ge, Garshin and Vereshchagin, Chekhov and Levitan.95

The active lives of Gogol and Ivanov cover almost exactly the same space of time-roughly the reign of Nicholas I-and illustrate in many ways the inner discontent of that age. Both left St. Petersburg dissatisfied in the 1830's to seek a new source of inspiration for their art and to spend most of their remaining years abroad.

Pilgrimages to foreign shrines were typical of the Nicholaevan era. A steady stream of Russians was visiting the residences of Schiller and Goethe. Zhukovsky, the father of Russian romantic poetry, spent many of his last years in Germany; the Munich of Schelling attracted Kireevsky, Shevyrev, and Tiutchev; the Berlin of the Hegelians drew Bakunin and Stankevich. Glinka and Botkin went to Spain, Khomiakov to Oxford, Herzen to Paris. The exotic regions of the Caucasus beckoned to Russians through the poetry of Baratynsky, Pushkin, and above all Lermontov. Romantic Auswanderung was so characteristic of the day that Stankevich suggested- in a caricature of Pushkin's Prisoner of the Caucasus-that the Russian intellectual secretly wished to become "a prisoner of the Kalmyks."96

Behind some of this travel lay the homesickness of the romantic imagination for the lost beauty of classical antiquity: "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." The search for links with this world was particularly anguished in Russia, which had no roots in classical tradition and little familiarity with the forms of art and life that had grown

* out of it in the Mediterranean world. The best that Russia could do was to

i

: "discover" the Crimea: the exotically beautiful peninsula in the Black Sea, : which had been the site of a former Greek colony where Iphigenia had : found asylum, and Mithradates, exile and death.